ADAM ANT IN MENTAL WARD

Eighties pop idol ADAM ANT was taken to a mental unit by police yesterday after a breakdown.

According to reports in today’s papers, Ant, who was about to make a comeback this year with other pop stars of the era on the Here And Now Tour II, was taken to the secure ward of the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, London after relatives feared he was suicidal.

A psychiatric team were sent to his Primrose Hill home, but the star fled, later to be picked up by police in nearby Camden Lock.

Ant, real name Stuart Leslie Goddard, was already on gun charges after an incident at the weekend when he brandished a World War Two gun after being refused entry to a pub in Kentish Town Road, London.

The star, who is 47 and has a previous history of mental ill health, has made a string of increasingly erratic appearances in public since he returned to the UK last year.

At one event, at the London Regency Rooms Christmas party last month, he had to be dragged from the stage after he refused to leave following a set of bizarre renditions of his Eighties hits.

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The Sun newspaper reports today that the singer had rung them from where he was being detained in the Royal Free’s Alice Ward.

Claiming that he was “not mad”, he then continued that he had been the victim of a conspiracy. He told the paper: “I’ve been abducted by the police again. They’ve attacked me again. I don’t know why….the whole thing’s a conspiracy and they’re just out to get me.”

The singer is being held at the ward under Section Two of the 1983 Mental Health Act.

There was no comment from Ant’s spokesperson at the present time, click back later to NME.COM for more later.